Bernard-Marie Koltès died twenty years ago this year. The anniversary has been marked by two major publications : the first
biography of the writer, by Brigitte Salino, and an edition of his
letters, by his brother. André Job’s review of the two works focuses
on what they teach us about Koltès, such as his support for the
French Communist party, the books he read, and the subtle manner in which he drew inspiration from certain events in his own
life. The main point of interest of the two works, however, is the
fact that they highlight the extent to which Koltès thought long
and hard about his own authorial practice, focusing on everything
from punctuation (and, more generally, sentence rhythm) to classical rhetoric and from silences to the interplay of gazes, thereby
great maturity and depth in even his earliest works

THE POETRY OF GESTURE -
Philippe Beck

Gallimard are to be congratulated on their decision to reprint
three titles by Father Marcel Jousse, S.J. (1886-1961) – L’Anthropologie du geste, La Manducation de la parole, and Le Parlant, la Parole et le Souffle. Jousse was a highly creative thinker ; his poetical
anthropology is also a poetics of anthropology, not only basing
poetics on anthropology but also identifying a poetics of scientific discourse on Man – given immediate application, as Philippe
Beck notes, by the conjunction of a highly inventive proliferation
of didactic neologisms and a strictly oral form of pedagogy (fortunately transcribed for posterity). The article examines Jousse’s
powerful, original thinking from three successive points of view :
an anthropology of living language based on the notion of ges-
ture ; a form of platonism unique in its attribution of powers of
death to the written text ; and a theory of the poetic gesture which
revisits the meaning of the unity of discourse through a rhythm-
based approach to pedagogy. It is clear why so many subsequent
researchers have drawn on Marcel Jousse’s work. A reassessment
of his writings is long overdue.

MULTIPLE IDENTITIES -
Philippe Raynaud

In her essay Composition française ; historian Mona Ozouf returns
to her Breton childhood. She explains how her identity was forged by the problematic co-existence of the national and the local
– the French Republic and Brittany. This constant, unresolved
tension, which she explores with great sensitivity, sheds light on
her intellectual journey. It suggests that Mona Ozouf’s thinking
on the blind alleys of French revolutionary culture is not solely
due to her comparison of the Terror and the Communist experiment, but also to her deeply-held belief that there was something
fundamentally unjust in the revolutionary refusal to countenance
distinctive identities, even in 1789. Mona Ozouf paints her own
self-portrait as a historian and a girondine in both senses of the
term – as an outspoken opponent of Terror and the excesses of
parisian centralism.

AVITAL RONELL : FRENCH CONNEXION -
Jérémie Majorel

Jérémie Majorel looks beyond American philosopher Avital Ronell’s spectacular style to examine her four latest books, recently
translated into French. The results are striking. Ronell draws inspiration from Derrida’s self-performing enunciative devices to
act as switchboard operator for the Word, multiplying immediate
remote connections. The interconnections of European metaphysi-
cal thought, from plato to Blanchot via Flaubert (Madame Bovary),
Nietzsche, and Heidegger, to name but a few, on an apparently
incongruous range of subjects, reactivates trans-secular themes –
calls, swimming, drugs, mourning, stupidity, ordeals, and ques-
tions. Avital Ronell – convocative rather than provocative – is an
electrifying thinker.

ANALYSIS : SOURCE AND SORCERY -
Patrick Hochart

Michèle Montrelay’s unique place within the Lacanian movement,
in respect of her recurring work on the theme of femininity and
gravidity, is apparent in her invention of her own mythology of
“being-two-within”. Within her practice, at ease in the register
of tragedy and anxiety, redoubling the “cross of transfer”, the
author reveals moments of pure emotion, soaring, “harmonic”
joy, which, in surging forth, marks the implantation of the tiny
being in the body which bears it. These moments, analysed with
germane subtlety that is directly descended from Freudian invention, cannot give rise to recall or representation, but they can
be reactivated. The article suggests several instances of such pri-
mordial couplings (as opposed to all the pitiful forms of fusion or
amalgamation), where proust’s “vanished world” resonates as a
“pathic” trace of the Other, in terms of the unconscious, cure, and
sublimation.

AN ETHICS OF DISENGAGEMENT -
Tiphaine Samoyault

Men of letters are neither writers nor intellectuals. They share
neither the singularity of the former nor the close connection to
their era of the latter. This justifies William Marx’s undertaking
in his fine essay Vie de lettré, which aims to write a timeless, col
lective biography of the man of letters, presenting his lifestyle,use of time, attitudes, and distinctive characteristics. Tiphaine
Samoyault reviews Marx’s project and the premises behind it,
particularly that of the continued survival of the man of letters as
a social type, by reading it against Julien Benda’s famous work of
1927, La Trahison des clercs, which questions the very possibility of
living as a man of letters in the modern world.

TIEPOLO’S NIGHTS -
Alain Rauwel, Guillaume de Sardes

Tiepolo is commonly held to be the lightest and most jovial artist
of a century reputed for what Talleyrand called its douceur de
vivre. The Italian publisher, author, and essayist Roberto Calasso
proves that this is just a cliché in his book Le Rose Tiepolo, which
studies the series of engravings called the Scherzi and highlights
how uncanny they are. What interpretation can be made of works
depicting elderly Orientals burning snakes on ruined altars ?
Does their very existence not require us to re-evaluate Tiepolo’s
entire œuvre ? Is the Venetian artist’s work perhaps deeper than
is generally acknowledged ? These are just some of the questions
raised by Calasso. But his book is also of interest in other ways.
Alain Rauwel and Guillaume de Sardes note that Le Rose Tiepolo
has wider relevance, demonstrating, for example, what the preconditions for understanding an image are.

THE GRANDEUR AND MISFORTUNES -
OF PSYCHIATRY -
Jean-Loup Motchane

The modern history of insanity, as described and analysed by
Patrick Coupechoux, is identified with the birth of psychiatry and
its subsequent manifestations. pinel’s “liberatory” gesture crea-
ted the pairing between doctor and patient, opening the golden
age of alienism (which differed in France and Germany). While
the encounter with psychoanalysis proved abortive, and society
was prey to powerful eugenic fantasies culminating in the crimes
of the Nazis, madness was judged to be treatable and therefore
partially removed from the aegis of the judicial authorities. Following the liberation of France, institutional psychotherapy and
the sector as a whole developed “democratic” perspectives that
encountered numerous obstacles as they were put in place. The
new approach was contested on the left by the anti-psychiatry
movement and challenged by the rise of medical biopower, based
on the discovery of new medical treatments and the success of
behavioural therapy ; it also failed to withstand the spread of
state policies cutting down on public spending from the 1970s
onwards. Psychiatry was their first target. The stigmatisation of
the mentally ill as dangerous criminals then became combined
with a global notion of a health policy for normal people. Developments are still afoot : watch this space.